>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 10/19/99 11:29AM >>>
Chaz wrote:
>My thing would be get a synopsis of Kant from some Marxists philosophers.<
and that presupposes that marxist philosophers felt the urge to read kant, right? why read only secondary texts, or rather texts mediated by the conjunctural concerns of others?
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Charles: Sure. Like Yoshie on this list or Ilyenkov or Politzer or Oizerman or Engels and Lenin. Lenin read Kant while in Siberia, according to Krupskaya. There were plenty of professional Marxist philosophers in the Soviet Union, and today in Cuba or China who have read Kant. There has to be some division of mental labor. You can rely on me for jurisprudence, and a signifcant amount of cultural anthropology. Do you want to read a bunch of original legal texts, or would you rather rely on secondary texts , even though mediated by the conjunctural concerns of others ? I'm willing to trust Yoshie's mediation of Kant.
I mean what about Democritus, Aristotle, Spinoza ,Rosseau and Feuerbach ? They are as important as Kant. It would be best if everybody could read everybody, but...that would lead to a bunch of overly scholastic revolutionaries, with little time for practice.
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this whole 'debate' is a non-starter. surely we should all be encouraged to read as widely as possible?
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Charles: Have you read Fidel Castro ? Or Feuerbach ? How about Haldane , the great biologist , who was a Marxist ? Angela Davis ? Marshall Sahlins ? Jill Nelson ? Stephen Jay Gould ? Jefferson ? Ben Franklin ? Diop ? It would be hard to read all of the collected works of Marx and Engels. Or Lenin.
I'm not saying don't read Kant. But, read it and tell me why he is so critical ( no pun). Then I might read it. At this point, Kant seems to become philosophical common sense, the common language of Philo 101 courses. I certainly recall my freshman philo prof. speaking in the Kantian medium - analytic a priori, synthetic a priori's don't exist. Then there have been several generations of neo-Kantians.
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and, paradoxically, even those arguing that kant should be taken off the syllabus have already shown that they at least leafed through kant themselves. and that's the whole problem: some folks are treating this as if we're arranging a list of prescribed readings for 'others' who are as incapable of reading critically as 'we' are capable of resisting being affected by what we read. a bit like the fictional self-portrait of our resident censorship board, making decisions about what others can and can't watch, whilst they're allowed -- indeed this is their apparently dutiful role -- to watch everything in order to be able to make decisions which presume the infantilisation of everyone else.
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Charles: The proposition is not don't read Kant if you have the time and inclination. You read that and tell me about it and I'll read Feuerbach and tell you about it. There has to be some division of labor, specialization.
I don't see it as prescribing a list for others , but the conclusion that Kant is not more important than about a forty other people I could think of. If you want to argue that Kant is more important than the other people I mention above, please make the argument, and I will listen. So far, what I have read and heard of Kant makes me think of him as the initiator of classical German philosophy followed by Fichte , Hegel and the other one; a systematizer of the Enlightenment/Age of Reason critique of religion and critical thinking in general ; a discoverer but not resolver of many of the contradictions of "reason" or formal logic, by his critique of reason even, not just religion; ultimately a dualist, a la Cartesianism, that is a materialist sometimes and an idealist others; an incipient but not developed dialectician. For example, he guessed theoretically that the solar system has a history. Thus, in the longer term he is a basis for understanding Hegel , who is a basis for!
understanding Marx, because Kant develops a lot of the basic idiom of classical German philosophy. Engels and Lenin use (critically ) the Kantian idiom of unknowable things-in-themselves in some of of their important epistemological analysis.
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only *others* are subject to the danger of enjoyment overtaking reason, and the censor can deny their enjoyment (in watching and reading forbidden texts *and* in playing the role of forbidder) by calling it a moral and/or political duty. that may well not be the direct implication of the debate over kant here, but it is nonetheless an implication that goes to why anyone would want to position themselves as the one simultaneously prescribing certain books and reading them.
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Charles: Kant seems to be criticism more than enjoyment overtaking reason.
To me this whole thing has more to do with the idea that I read a lot more than the average person, and I still don't read as much as a lot of people on these lists. It is difficult for me to see predominantly physical laborers reading more than I do, just being realistic. So, they are even farther from ever likely reading Kant. All this philosophical reading is not worth much if it is not part of raising the consciousness of most people. So, how do we get the enormous mass of reading down to a more manageable size for most people.
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as for what forbidding and prescribing actually does, i think marx's comments that censoring actually makes something desirable has to be taken seriously esp by those who expect such laws to have a negative effect on things like racism and sexism. the premise of leftist censorship (that it will actually halt the spread of whatever loathsome or troubling speech and images) turns out to occassion the very opposite.
the recent changes to the censorship board in australia, which were really a sharpening of changes made under the previous govt, were able to pass precisely because the right was able to garner support from various apparently liberal feminist organisations in what was publicly touted as a way to shut down hateful representations of women. since my closest friend was charged under the censorship board and by the police with publishing material encouraging illegal acts, i can honestly say i've little time for the claim that such laws will not be used against the left.
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Charles: Actually, my claim is that censorship has always been used against the Left. Note Charles Schenck of the _Schenck_ case was a socialist who opposed WWI. He was put in jail for urging workers not to signup for the draft. In other words, he was an American Bolshevik at the time. So, the point is the Left is already being censored, so the idea that the Left has something to lose by the Right being censored is not paying attention to what has actually happened to the Left. In other words, what are you saying the Left has to lose ? Are you saying the bourgeois state has been protecting the Left, not censoring it up to this point ? This seems a naive reliance and belief in the record and history of bourgeois governments on censorship of the Left. Are you saying if the Left does not call for censorship of fascists, that bourgeois governments will not censor the Left ? Isn't that naive trust in the consistency and honesty of bourgeois governments ? Are you saying the way to ! keep the Australian government from censoring the Australian Left is to oppose censorship of the Australian fascists ? Why don't you think the Australian government will censor the Left and not censor the Right at the same time ?
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if it is admitted that only a strong working class movement mitigates against such 'misuses', then surely the aim would be to strengthen the autonomous character of the working class movement. we can be sure the capitalist state will respond with whatever reforms it deems will deliver only sufficient to deter further radicalisations -- which is not to sniff at reforms generally, only to suggest that the game of reformism does not seem to move forward by positing reformist demands.
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Charles: Positing reformist demands does not contradict strengthening the autonomous character of the wc movement. What would be the form of this strengthening of the autonomous character of the wc movment ? Would it only have revolutionary demands ? Why is it that reformist demands do not strengthen it ? How is it that outlawing fascist speech is not a revolutionary demand ? Bourgeois liberal reformists seem to oppose it .
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that, however, is over and above the question of whether or not *particular* proposals might constitute reforms at any given moment. if it's a question of going for the fiction of the universality of the law, then i'd much rather spend time and energy on getting laws like 'offensive language' and 'drunken in a public place' repealed: these are the two laws used most consistently in australia against Aborigines, working class and lumpenised youth, and those who live public housing projects generally (increasingly, workers who recently migrated from eastern europe, asia and the mid east) -- ie,. i would rather go for those things that are used to criminalise, not add to the list of things we can be criminalised for.
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Charles: I am not proposing support for "offensive language" or "drunken in a public place" laws as part of a communist program.
CB